ANCHORA - Rooting of a collaborative platform of actors in education towards a sustainable development

Contract I2/AE/203 :

Duration of the contract :

1/10/2003-30/9/2005

Partners :

Université de Liège&nbsp(Coordinator of the project)

Institut d'Eco-Pédagogie asbl&nbsp

Cassiopea asbl&nbsp

Description :

Education is regarded as one of the main levers for achieving sustainable development in terms of “local action” and “personal change”. Relying on such a lever requires an educational approach which is decompartmentalised, which values exchanges, and which is based on the co-construction of knowledge and skills. At present, although the educational offer in the Belgian associative landscape is very rich, it remains highly compartmentalised with respect to the theoretical intellectual models, the educational approaches and its players. Developing an education towards sustainable development must therefore be based on the convergence of a multitude of educational sectors : education on the environment, on development, on health, on citizenship, on the sciences, on consumption, etc.

The first objective of the ANCHORA project is to bring together the players of these various forms of "education on" in order to allow them to get to know one another better and to forge links between themselves and between their projects.

Following on from this first objective, the ANCHORA project seeks to develop with and among these players a collaborative dynamic via the creation of an Internet platform (dynamic website developed on the basis of the adaptation of freeware) equipped with tools which facilitate exchange, collaboration and co-construction.

Finally (third objective), the ANCHORA project will study how to anchor both these new, more collaborative ways of working and the tools which facilitate this collaboration in the practices and institutions of these players.

The first phase of work, accompanied by a working group composed of players coming from these different educational approaches, should lead to the development and testing of a platform which will make it possible to structure educational contents and which will be fed collaboratively by user organisations. Beyond the technical production, this first phase will also see the definition of recommendations on the functional, organisational and technical anchoring of these collaborative tools within the user organisations. In addition, the decompartmentalisation of these educational approaches will also make it possible to define pedagogical objectives for developing the skills of the educational players concerned vis-à-vis the global dimension of education towards sustainable development.

A second phase of work should then make it possible - beyond the continuation and evolving development of the first-phase objectives - to develop the multilingual use of such a platform as well as its operation in an e-learning perspective : training modules for the appropriation of the collaborative tools on the Internet and training modules linked to the development of the skills of the educational players vis-à-vis a global educational approach.